Hal to Avery

Yes, real-world operationalizations would help. I'm interested in
how you model the interaction between two or more
people or groups. Bear in mind people are talking about pct in
organizational management. Let's start with just one person to whom
we want to apply pct to bring about a particular result, and account
for what that subject wants out of the person trying to apply the pct.

Whenever I try to model this simplest exercise in social control
(e.g., to see whether motive shifts
between actors interact in the form taken by the two open triangles
which together make a tetrahedron), I find actors shifting back and
forth across Bill Powers's first nine levels, with a tendency
reflecting a tenth-order global tendency to go one's own way or to
keep reorienting what one is after with reference to the
(re)orientation of others' "motives" (which I think in PCT terms
translates as something like vectors between one's perception and
one's referent.

Anyway, yeah, some real world talk would help. Thanks. l&p hal

I think you're onto something Avery. In chap. 7 of THE GEOMETRY OF
VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRACY, "Speaking Freely With Children as a Path to
Peace," I describe it in terms of
three-person interaction, actually three ways my wife, daughter and I
approached her going to bed. I refer the scenarios back to the
tetrahedronal model I derive in the chap. 5 presentation of the model
of distinguishing peaceful from violent interaction, drawing
from Buckminster Fuller. One of the terms I use for what I otherwise
call democratic or tetrahedronal interaction is resonance.

It's a little egotistical, I suppose, to suggest that you, Avery, or
someone else might want to look at the book, but I do hesitate to
describe it all rather than illustrating it, as I in effect do in my
New World Order Diary entries and in the feminist justice seminar
letters, or as I apply it in for example now helping a computer
consultant in limbo clear himself and get his job back.

What I have noticed is that we have two bodies of knowledge, of
cathexis, in our souls--one of how to win games of domination, and one
of how to democratize interaction in which we participate. Over the
past seven years or so, as I have become conscious of the other body
of knowledge we seldom use here and now in public discourse, I have
discovered what a wealth of low-visibility experience and skill there
is in living peacefully. Within this body of knowledge, conflicts
become assets, ways to learn, rather than contests. Confrontation of
the personal source of one's fears is the first principle of this form
of interaction, rather than separation as in the war models of
knowledge.

I am, as I wrote in the syllabus that started my participation in
csg-l, aware of my own violence. I have discovered in myself a
capacity imagining myself in others' places doing very brutal things.
Among other things I believe that capacity for understanding led a
student in my big class, as we discussed the Gulf War, to describe
what he perceived and felt when as an EMT in the Navy Seals he knifed
an Iraqi soldier to death as he tried to rescue one of his own. He
compared the warmth that came from the victim as he died to that he
had felt in many others he had tried to save before. Among other
things, the student allowed me to illustrate the mistake many of us
who grew up in the sixties believe we made--to villify returning
soldiers as killers rather than welcoming them home from perilous
circumstances in which they felt any number of irresistible forces to
kill. I'm nearly 49, and no one of the many combat soldiers I have met has
ever given me the gift of understanding what it means to kill in other
than disembodied terms or in the kind of excitement I infer rapists
experience. Last week I had read a six-page letter a rape survivor
in the class had given me to read anonymously. I guess that the rate
of this capacity of students to contribute to what we all learn about
violence and control is rather extraordinary, and suppose that my
conscious application of tetrahedronal principles has something to do
with the result.

PCT quite cogently describes one of my bodies of knowledge, that of
how to survive as a warrior. That side is important to know about
too. Here I go again. I'm thinking my world and that of PCT-ists can
be connected; in return I keep hearing messages of separation, of what
sets PCT apart. Do you see the issue?

By the way, Chris Wickens and I were on the same little high-school
wrestling team, where I learned how much I hated competition. Given
that I grew up believing Chris's dad was the major figure in
psychology, recent correspondence on Chris (who was a year behind me
in school) reminds me of how many years lie behind me. l&p hal

I'm sorry if I seem to be complaining. I'm more curious than put off.
My thesis is that PCT presents a model of control which inherently
provokes violence, and that beside it we have another model to follow,
in which among other things conflict is deemed desirable. l&p hal

[From Rick Marken (930927.1600)]

Hal to Avery --

My thesis is that PCT presents a model of control which inherently
provokes violence,

A violence provoking model, hmmm. It's possible. I wouldn't
have thought models could provoke much of anything until I
saw Cindy Crawford on the cover of Vanity Fair (now THERE's
an apparently open-loop behavior, folks).

and that beside it we have another model to follow,
in which among other things conflict is deemed desirable.

It's not clear from this sentence which model it is that you
think deems conflict to be desirable, yours or ours. By the
way, was your conflict with the university administration
based on your model of people or PCT's?

Have you actually read BCP, Hal, or are you just making this
stuff up as you go along (or both)?

Best

Rick